Marathon: The Patriots Day Bombing Shines a Light on the Struggles of Survivors

“You pass a sea of humanity, thousands of people screaming, strangers kissing strangers,” says an unidentified interviewee at the outset of the new documentary Marathon: The Patriots Day Bombing, which airs tonight on HBO. “They will literally bring you across the finish line.”

He’s speaking about the experience of running the Boston Marathon, the world’s oldest annual race of its kind (it dates back to 1897), now infamous as the setting of a grisly act of terrorism. On April 15, 2013, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Chechen brothers raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, planted a pair of pressure cooker bombs near the marathon finish line; when they went off, the homemade explosives claimed the lives of three people, and injured hundreds more.

There’s plenty of documentary-ready angles to this story: the four-day manhunt that shut down the city of Boston and the surrounding area and ended with 26-year-old Tamerlan dead and 19-year-old Dzhokhar in police custody (an event in itself so cinematically suspenseful that it’s now the subject of Patriots Day, a feature film starring Mark Wahlberg that hits theaters next month); Dzhokhar’s high-profile trial two years later and the questions it raised about the federal death penalty; the personal story of the Tsarnaev brothers, and how they seemingly self-radicalized with the help of extremist jihadist propaganda.

Marathon, made by filmmakers Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg in partnership with the Boston Globe, touches on all these angles, but the directors’ attempt to cover their bases ultimately feels like a distraction from their main focus: on the experience of a handful of survivors, spectators whose lives were indelibly changed by the decision to add their voices to the chorus buoying the marathoners to glory. For those running, the finish line was booby-trapped, but the course had an end. For those caught in the destruction of the blast, there is no real finish line; recovering from injuries this traumatic, the film makes clear, takes true endurance.

Stern and Sundberg focus on six main subjects. There are brothers Paul and J.P. Norden, each of whom lost a leg. They were brought by ambulances to different hospitals, forcing their mother to shuttle between her sons during the critical early days of their treatment. There’s Celeste Corcoran, who lost both legs, and her daughter Sydney, who nearly bled out. Physically they both make significant progress—Celeste even learns to swim in the ocean using special beach legs—but their PTSD proves thornier.

And then there’s Patrick Downes and Jessica Kensky, newlyweds with similar injuries but heartbreakingly different experiences of rehabilitation. Each lost a leg on April 15, 2013. Three years later, Downes triumphantly ran the 2016 Boston Marathon on a prosthetic blade, a charm bearing his wife’s photo dangling from his shoelaces. Kensky remained wheelchair-bound on the sidelines. Her surviving leg had become so painful she’d been forced to endure a second amputation a year after the bombings, and the sheared-off bone remained abnormally troublesome, too raw for prosthetics.

It’s their story, still so unresolved, that hits home the hardest. Stern and Sundberg rely heavily on talking-head interviews with their subjects, a technique that might draw criticism in another documentary. From the shoulders up, these survivors seem whole; out of the frame, we know all too well that they’re not.

In one scene we watch as Downes and Kensky wake up and get ready for their day. “The way you see the world is so different,” Downes observes, as he goes through the steps of attaching his prosthetic leg. “Really, it’s an identity crisis.”

Then the camera switches to his wife, wheeling herself down the sidewalk, the stumps of her knees pointing out ahead of her. “Being an amputee is my identity right now,” she says in a voiceover. “This is our reality. This is our real life.”

Watch Marathon: The Patriots Day Bombing on HBO tonight at 8:00 p.m. EST.